Often, when one writes a game, one wants a specific resolution to make sure that the game works as expected. Zoomed out textures may not look as nice and the speed could be affected too (drawing 1280x1024 pixels instead of 640x480 is more than 4x higher and all video boards won't be as fast as required in this case). Under MS-Windows you can ask the system to change resolution (size & depth) with a call to ChangeDisplaySettings().

Argh! It happened again and I just couldn't remember the key strokes. And it's hard to find the docs about it so I write my own right here. What's all that about?!

In X11, when you inadvertendly hit "Num Lock" on your keypad while you're holding the Shift key down, you actually turn ON this special Keypad feature: the Keypad becomes a mouse!

Hit Shift + NumLock again, and you get out of that mode (i.e. a toggle)

MS-Windows is extremely flexible. So one of the things you can do is delete your Start menu. It's a good way to prevent people from starting the "wrong" software. Now, without that menu and a few icons, what do you do?!

The Start -> Run menu is accessible using a Window key (held down) and the R key (W-R). This will open the Run window in which you can run all sorts of programs. It is a console reduce to its minimum! (Invented by Microsoft, thank you!)